


love me, leave me

by alpacasandravens



Series: i need to stop being sad about lonelyeyes [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Falling In Love, Jonah!Elias, M/M, Marriage, also many divorces, immortal!peter, like many marriages, peter's childhood really sucked guys, they're both bastards but at least they're happy for most of this?, victorian lonelyeyes, with lots of peter introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 15:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19254331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Statement of Peter Lukas, regarding... his relationship. Statement taken - volunteered by subject.Or, it's Peter's anniversary, and he doesn't realize how personal telling the story of his marriage will get.





	love me, leave me

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Before you read, I wanted to clarify the warnings/what content there is here. This fic deals a lot with Peter growing up in Moorland House and being raised by the Lonely, which automatically necessitates warnings for childhood emotional abuse and child neglect. Obviously it's Lonely Eyes and thus an incredibly unhealthy relationship. Finally, while Peter is a Horny Bastard, and thus talks about and references sex a lot, there's nothing even remotely descriptive in here. If anyone thinks it needs any more warnings, please let me know!!  
> I wasn't going to finish this but then i saw @cuttooth's post on tumblr about Peter giving a statement and then I had to. This has a lot more lonelyeyes than their post, but hey. it's me. title from Bad Decisions by Bastille because i'm obsessed and it's also SUCH a lonely eyes song.  
> also, writing this was weird because i have an ex named jonah but somehow i managed it. i'll never quite know how. elias, why did you have to have that specific name??

Jon held his hand over the box of tapes and things in Elias’s - now Peter’s - office, waiting for the Beholding to tell him which to take. It was far later than he normally stayed at work - he was reasonably sure it was actually getting closer to morning by this point - so Elias shouldn’t be watching, but he still couldn’t stay long. He needed the whole box, had to listen to them all, know where they came from, but he couldn’t take them all at once. The Eye would see which one he needed to hear next, and after only a moment or two, he found himself picking up a tape that had become almost buried near the right side of the box. 

As he turned to sneak back out of the office, something changed. The air felt different, or Jon’s ears picked up the faintest hint of static, or he just knew something was different. He turned around slowly, keeping the tape he’d picked up as hidden as possible. Around him, he could hear five or six tape recorders click on.

The door to the office was still cracked at the same angle Jon had left it when he entered, but now he was no longer the only person in the room. Peter sat in the chair behind the desk, leaning it back just far enough to pick the front wheels up off the ground for a second or two before dropping them back to the ground. Peter held a glass with some kind of alcohol (Jon didn’t know much about alcohol, being too much of a lightweight to drink enough to learn) and spun the drink around the bottom of the glass. When Peter turned his head to meet Jon’s eyes, he could see they had lost most of their usual focus and smug superiority. 

“What are you doing here?” Peter asked.

“I could ask the same of you.”

“This is my office, not yours.” 

“Why are you drinking in your office alone?” Jon countered.

“It’s a time to celebrate!” Peter said, spinning his desk chair to face Jon head-on just a little too fast. A brief flash of - not fear, but not his usual blank amusement flitted across his face as he lost his balance and caught himself.

Jon raised an eyebrow. “It’s a Wednesday night.” 

“It’s my anniversary,” Peter cheerfully volunteered.

“Your… anniversary.” Though Elias was probably spying, the room was physically empty except for the two of them. Lonely avatar or not, Jon was fairly certain that wasn’t how anniversaries were supposed to go.

“Yes, and quite a special one too,” Peter said, taking a drink from the glass he held. “Two hundred years.”

“I was unaware the Lonely allowed its devotees relationships.” Jon could feel it, the itch to understand, to know. And he hated it, because this wasn’t knowing something about the fears, or an avatar, or even a trivial fact he could excuse because it was useful. This was the sort of knowing that Elias did, prying into everyone’s mind on a whim. To feed the Eye, yes, but mostly because he thought it was fun. And he _wasn’t like Elias_. But the Eye called, so he asked. “And two hundred years?”

“You are unaware of many things, Archivist.” Peter laughed once, more of a form of sarcastic punctuation than as a genuine laugh. “You have so much more to learn.”

“Why don’t you tell me, then?” Jon crossed his arms, somewhat awkwardly as he’d forgotten he was carrying a tape. 

Peter leaned back in his chair. The plastic squeaked. “As enjoyable as it is to watch you blunder your way through everything, cut off from everyone you know and care for - maybe I should tell you this. It’ll be like a gift. ‘Happy anniversary love, I’ve given your Eye a statement to devour.’ It won’t quite make up for him giving me the Institute last year, but it’s a start.”

Jon had no idea what was going on, but he knew how to take a statement. A tape recorder that had been idly recording from the top drawer of Peter’s desk appeared on the desk between them. It was still running.

“Statement of Peter Lukas, regarding … his relationship. Statement taken - statement volunteered from subject.” He rattled off the date, then nodded at Peter to begin.

 

“I assume you’re familiar with the Greek myths, Archivist. With Oedipus and Cassandra and the inevitability of fate. Tell a person their future, and they will run as far from it as they can, only to end up exactly where they were told they would be. Keep it from them, and they will find their way there just the same. 

When the Romantics rejected the cold rationality and classicism that came before them, they rejected that idea of inevitability as well. They fell in love with the world and made their own destinies, and I did the same. It’s so easy to get caught up in the spirit of an idea and let it take hold of you. Whether the idea is that sense of freedom, or love, or even loneliness. It’s truly impressive, what the mind can convince itself of. 

I convinced myself that I didn’t have to do this, to be this. I was wrong, of course. All the Romantics were. There is so much more to this world than ourselves, as you well know. The Eye was always going to have you, from the day you were born, and the Lonely was always going to have me. The only thing we can change is how we arrive there.”

 

“Your compulsion is strong, Archivist,” Peter broke off from his statement with a small, strained chuckle. “I wonder, do you know what you can do with it?”

“I can make you finish your statement, for one thing. Statement continues.”

 

“The Lukases have served our god since we can remember. That idiot Smirke thought he invented the rituals, but all he did was make them stronger. Before him, before all of this, Moorland House was already the home of the Lonely, spreading tendrils of its fog as far as it could reach. Setting foot inside was something else entirely. 

That house searches for your certainties and wears away at them. It asks ‘Are you sure?’ and it asks until you can’t be any longer. Have you ever seen a mime? Even a parody of one is enough. They pretend to be inside a glass cage, no way forward, impossible to climb out of. They hit the glass and eventually, they find a door they can sneak out of. Moorland House is that cage, but there is no door. It sends its fog to cut off any connection you manage to form, and then it revels in your isolation. 

When I was sixteen, I thought I had found a door. I opened it and I ran, far away from the cold eyes and silent distance and emptiness that was all I’d ever known. And in the end, I found myself trapped in the same cage I’d run away from. 

I never knew where I was running to. It wasn’t love, not then. I thought it was, but all I was doing was searching for connection with anyone. I’d never known anyone before. I knew the philosophers I studied better than my own parents, and so when I met Jonah, and he cared about me, what other choice could I make?

Do you know, after all this time, I can’t remember how we met? He barely knew about the powers, back then. It was 1811 and we thought we could do anything. He could stay away from the lure of power, of knowledge, and I could leave my family and my god behind me. Impossible, of course, but the beauty of it was that it never had to be possible. We only had to think it was.

So I left Moorland House and I moved in with Jonah. I’d known him a month and he was the best friend I’d ever had. He had a small flat in Oxford, close enough to the university that he could walk to his classes. I got a job - I waited tables at a pub, just to drown myself in the stilted, scripted but still genuine social interactions I’d never gotten to participate in. I hated it after three months. 

My family sent me letters, asking me to come back. ‘The Forsaken will forgive you,’ they said. ‘You’re throwing away everything we gave you.’ They never came to talk to me, though I knew they knew where I was. Then they would have had to speak to me, to try and connect with me, in a way they weren’t capable of. 

That didn’t stop me from being afraid. I’ve always wondered whether what I do now truly feeds the Lonely as much as I did back then, when I was terrified of going back to what I’d left behind. 

But I’m getting off track. This isn’t my story; this is the story of Jonah and I. But how could you hope to understand that without knowing everything? 

I adored Jonah. He was my best friend and I thought he’d saved me, though he’d done nothing but give me the courage to leave. I thought I had everything I could ever want. And then he dragged me out of a friend’s party and kissed me senseless in the hallway, and I knew I wanted that so much more. We were seventeen and just drunk enough that nothing else mattered, and when he told me he loved me in an alley filled with dirty snow and garbage, I’d never felt less lonely.

I stayed with him until he finished his degree, struggling through long hours at the pub until I couldn’t take it anymore and quit. Customer service is a particular type of hell, and I soon realized that going through the motions, telling different people the same things night after night, wasn’t going to make me closer to anyone. People think less of you when you work a job like that, cut you off from the rest of society and put you in a box of people they consider unimportant. I decided I would never be in that box.

So I drifted. Took accounting and finance classes at Jonah’s university. Applied for a management position at a shop and got it, somehow, despite my low qualifications. The air of isolation I even then brought into the room helped.

And even though I’d run away, I thought I’d escaped, I still found myself lonely. Because it’s inescapable, you see? Because as Jonah got closer to his degree, he would spend longer hours in the library, researching until he could see light coming back over the trees. Some nights he never came home, too caught up in his work. And when he was home, he was distracted, always with half his mind on a paper, or a project, or something that wasn’t me. There wasn’t as much passion behind his kisses anymore, but I only kissed him harder, desperately hoping to feel the same delirious happiness and sense of connection I remembered. And sometimes, I did.

Things got better when we moved to London after he graduated. For a year or two, I had everything back - I still didn’t have many friends of my own, only of Jonah’s, but that never mattered much. He doted on me, made me feel like he knew me completely and still wanted me. It was the Beholding in him; I know that now. I might have even known that then, but that was something I couldn’t resist. Not that I wanted to.

Our friends knew about us, of course. They pretended they didn’t, but, well, it’s taken me centuries to build a filter for my words when I’m drunk, and I apparently still haven’t managed it. In the light of day, everything was as it should be. There were even two bedrooms in the flat we rented, though one was solely upkept for appearances’ sake. But when his friends invited us over for a drink, that was another story. We could barely keep our hands off each other, and we always left early. Sometimes, if the friend lived farther away from us, we wouldn’t make it home, instead finding a dark corner in an alley or an empty bathroom. 

People resented us for it, of course. Not just for being together at all, though that bothered a fair number of them. But for being so obvious about it. What do the young people these days call it, Archivist? PDA? PDA has always made people uncomfortable, especially in 1815 between two young men. But we excelled at it. I could feel the moment when we became too much for our friends. That moment varied from gathering to gathering, being anywhere from leaning against each other and smiling stupidly to practically laying on each other. I could feel their discomfort, their agitation and a newly awakened sense of loneliness, and I thrived on it. Of course, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing then. But over and over, as we flaunted what we had and our friends grew increasingly annoyed and jealous, I basked in their envy, their sense of their own comparable isolation.

I asked Jonah to marry me the next year. We’d been together for five years and I couldn’t imagine my life without him. Or, I could, but it was the bleak and empty halls of my childhood home and a creeping sense of isolation I could never shake. 

It wasn’t a grand gesture, that time. Nothing we did back then could be counted as such. I hadn’t even made the dinner - we’d picked up something from the deli down the street. I didn’t have a ring. He wouldn’t have been able to wear it if I’d had one - there were some things that just couldn’t be done, and wearing a wedding ring without any ability to produce evidence of a wife, even a deceased one, was one of those things. 

But I asked him to marry me anyway. ‘It doesn’t have to be anything big,’ I’d said. We couldn’t actually get married, not then, but I didn’t say that. ‘We could do it just for us.’

He said yes, and I was so surprised. I’m still not sure why; maybe still the shock that someone would want to be connected to me enough to spend the rest of their life with me. We got married a week later in our flat. There was no ceremony, just a friend of a friend we knew was more accepting than most authorized to marry and one of Jonah’s long-suffering university friends we dragged in as a witness. We were determined to do it properly, so though we couldn’t be married in the eyes of the state, we were in the eyes of a God neither of us believed in. Afterwards, we had takeout, got so drunk we could barely stand, and didn’t leave the bedroom for days.

That’s always going to be my favorite wedding. We’ve gotten married so many times now, at so many different places, and we keep trying to outdo the last wedding. Nothing is ever enough anymore. But we’ll never be able to match the reality of that first wedding, back when we thought it would be our only one. Back when we were truly promising each other our lives. I suppose, even after all these years, I’m still somewhat of a romantic after all. 

Looking back on those days now, I should have known they wouldn’t last. That we couldn’t always just be ourselves in that moment. We didn’t mean to, not consciously, but when we retreated to our bedroom, we retreated from our gods as well. Our togetherness didn’t isolate anyone, and though Jonah already Knew me, he studied me not for the Eye but for himself.

But I suppose you don’t want to hear about that, do you? The Eye already knows, and your human curiosity doesn’t extend to that particular part of my story. 

In any case, it didn’t last. We were married in 1816 and two years later, Jonah had set up his precious Institute. He promised me it was to learn about the powers so that he could stay neutral, and -”

 

“Hold on,” Jon interrupted. “You were married to Jonah Magnus?”

“I still am, though we are in a bit of a rough patch right now. Might be another divorce coming on, but I do hope not. If the Extinction does prove a real threat, I’d rather not die a single man.”

“Jonah Magnus is still alive? I know the Lightless Flame live long lives, and apparently you, but…”

“Staying alive so long isn’t easy, Archivist. You barely manage week to week, and that’s with your patron’s help. Jonah just happens to be especially motivated. But to you, yes, Jonah Magnus is dead. He dropped that name over a century ago, when it started to get him in too much trouble. You know him as Elias now.”

Jon’s brain short circuited. “Elias.”

“He never would give up his Institute,” Peter said fondly. 

“You. Are married. To _Elias_.”

“Yes.” Peter smiled in a way Jon wanted but hated to call smitten.

“Christ, I’m going to need to bleach my brain after this,” Jon muttered. “Statement continues.”

 

“He promised me he would stay neutral, that the Institute would never give in to its Beholding tendencies and instead would remain separate. I wanted to believe him. If he could learn about the powers and stay neutral, never giving in to one or falling victim to one of their schemes, then so could I. It had been seven years since I’d left my family home, and its shadow still fell over me. I still ran from it.

But in the end, Jonah couldn’t stay neutral. I don’t know what did it, whether it was the thirst for knowledge, a desperate grab at some deeper form of understanding, or simply a fear of death. The Eye promised him everything. He would never die, he said, never grow so old as to start to forget. We’d been married thirty years, and he threw everything away. 

Sometimes, I think he did what he did to save us. I like to think, when I’m being generous, that he let the Eye have him so that he could always be with me, so that the End would have no hold over him and would never tear us apart. It’s a lie, I know. I don’t know why he gave in after thirty-five years of self-professed neutrality, but I saw it coming. He started pulling away, slowly enough I could doubt myself when I saw the signs, but steadily enough there was no other possible conclusion. When he finally did it, I told him I wanted a divorce. I’d taken my things and left by the next morning.

I had nowhere to go. When I found myself on the front steps of Moorland House, hating everything I’d ever done to end up there and hating Jonah even more, there was no reason for me to run anymore. 

‘Welcome home, Peter,’ my mother said when she opened the door. She hadn’t aged a day since I’d left, and now I looked old enough to be her father. ‘I always knew you’d be back.’

Here’s where Fate comes into play, Archivist. Jonah had fought it as long as he could, and so had I. If I hadn’t found him, if I hadn’t left, I would have joined because I had no other choice. Because the cold fog of the Forsaken was the closest thing to home I’d ever had. Maybe I would have always left, there was no other path for me. But I know I would have returned. 

Fate belongs to the Web, you see. It takes the strands of your life and it weaves them until there’s no escape, until the only way forward is along its path. Those who this terrifies are its victims, those who this excites are its acolytes. The rest of us are manipulated all the same.

Because I chose Jonah, because I tried to create love instead of ending it, the Web brought me back to my place in the only way it could - betrayal. Jonah’s choice had felt like a knife to the heart then. I didn’t understand, and I didn’t think I ever could. So I ran back to the Lonely, and I threw myself into it. I had nothing left, no reason to stay away. I would take the loneliness I felt and turn it on the world, make Jonah see exactly how I felt. 

I rose through the ranks of the family like I’d never left. They forgave me, of course. I’d repented and that was all that mattered to them. 

The next time I saw Jonah, I was meeting with the delegations from the Eye and the Vast. Though we didn’t know it yet, this partnership with the Vast would eventually bring us the Daedalus, though not for another hundred and fifty years. Jonah had changed his name by then. It was 1868, and I hadn’t seen him in twenty-two years, since I’d stormed out of our flat in the early morning. He introduced himself as James, but I’d know him anywhere. 

I think, sometime along the way, that the Web wove Jonah into my Fate too. I chose him in the beginning, but now he is as impossible to escape as my god. I’ve given my heart to him and my soul to the Forsaken, and it was inevitable. 

James had never pretended neutrality like Jonah had. He had begun as a devotee of the Eye and he only dove further in, never Knowing enough to satisfy him. I wondered if my family had sent me to this meeting to test me, if they knew he would be there and wanted me to prove my loyalty. To choose them over him. I didn’t. When I returned home late the next afternoon in the same clothes and practically glowing with happiness and loneliness, they looked down their noses at me and pretended I didn’t exist. This wasn’t much different from normal, of course. I had grown used to it.

We never quite found the kind of love that we’d had before. James lived in the same flat we’d bought together, a few years after we’d gotten married in our old one. But now our gods were ever-present, and we were never the same. I could still feel the ghost of what we’d had just by looking at him from across the room in a meeting. I’d remember when we were so in love that we could shut out the rest of the world, and I’d pretend we had found that again in our wandering hands in the coat closet when the meetings took short breaks. I proposed to him again the next year.

Even as I asked, I knew we wouldn’t last. We couldn’t. I left on business trips for weeks at a time, fed my god on his isolation. He watched me when I was gone, and I made sure he saw me with other people, just to make him jealous. Coming home was always so much more fun when he was jealous. We made it fifteen years that time. 

It’s been two hundred years now, and we’ve never managed to find each other again, but we haven’t left either. We can’t anymore. That twenty two years was the longest we’ve stayed apart, and the first thirty years was the longest we’ve been married. We are inevitable, now. 

Happy anniversary, Elias. I would say I wish you were here, but being completely honest, we both know I don’t.”

Peter downed the rest of the drink he’d been absently holding for most of his statement. Jon’s mouth hung open in something like shock - ever since he’d talked to Michael, he’d wondered if the monsters were still people, somewhere. When he’d come back from the Unknowing, he’d gotten his answer. But Peter showed him that even by trying to save that humanity, he could lose it.

“Get out.” Peter said. Jon opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water before nodding hastily and backing out of the room. He made it all the way back to his archive before remembering the tape he’d come in there for in the first place.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments/kudos always appreciated!! Especially comments they feed my soul lol  
> I'm on tumblr also @alpacasandravens if anyone wants to chat about these bastards.


End file.
